The “elegant” was the first of the butterfly race who exhibited a calmness of bearing. He smiled rather than answered, when spoken to; never gazed at his reflection in a glass, but concentrated his looks upon his own proper person. He was in a continual calm ecstasy at the sight of so charming a doll, so admirably dressed. “The ‘elegant,’” says Mercier, “pays visits of not more than a quarter of an hour’s duration. He no longer proclaims himself the ‘friend of the duke,’ the ‘lover of the duchess,’ or the ‘indispensable man at little suppers.’ He speaks of the retirement in which he lives, of the chemistry which he studies, of his distaste for the great world. He lets others speak; and while they speak, an almost imperceptible smile of derision flutters on his lips. He is dreaming while he listens to you. He does not noisily leave a room, but glides out of it; and a quarter of an hour after he has quitted you, he writes you a note, as if he had not seen you for months, just to show you that he is an absent man.” The “elegant” was not without his uses. He brought down superlativeism. Exaggeration of speech and of dress went out as he came in. This change extended to female as well as male society. He rendered social intercourse however a difficulty for intellectual men. The latter had indeed no difficulty in talking of science with the wise, of knowledge with the learned, of war with the soldier, and of dogs and horses with the nobles; but he did find a difficulty in talking about nothing with those fashionable women who cared only for the subject most patronized by the “elegant.” What dreadful guys were the French children of the middle of the last century! Their monkeys, who danced upon cords, for the edification of the _grande nation_, were not more ridiculous. Fancy a boy seven years old: his head was powdered profusely, and between his little shoulders hung the wide tie or bag of his hair. Therewith he wore a full-sleeved and broad-skirted coat, immense ruffles, a cocked hat, not on his head,—it was not big enough for that,—but beneath his arm; and upon his tobacco-pipe of a thigh there hung a needle of a sword! And this young old man could hold himself erect, could bow like a judge, and was kept lean by late hours. He had, in the common acceptation of the words, neither wrists, arms, nor legs of his own. He seemed jointless, but he had been taught how to sit down, and how to walk a minuet.